


More Than A Team

by MercuryGray



Category: Band of Brothers (TV 2001)
Genre: Awkward Conversations, Brother-Sister Relationships, College, Coming Out, Ice Cream, Ice Cream Parlors, M/M, Moving Out, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-War, Sibling Bonding, but only sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-14 03:41:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29412102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray
Summary: As an older brother, moving your sister into college is just one of those things you do, even if it's the hottest day of the year and your help isn't being very helpful,But ice cream afterwards helps, a little, with the moving, and dealing with the heat - and with having the conversations you just can't have at home.
Relationships: Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters
Comments: 18
Kudos: 61
Collections: Band of Brothers Love Fest 2021





	More Than A Team

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [BandofBrothersLoveFest_2021](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/BandofBrothersLoveFest_2021) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
> Whipped cream.

Who knew you needed so many things for a dorm room?

Dick couldn’t remember bringing this many boxes when he’d moved into college, but then, he wasn’t a girl, as his sister reminded him sharply after he made some comment about yet another box of clothes.

“Well, it’s easy for you to say,” Annie said, planting herself and the crate she’d been carrying on the carpet, not here for any of her brother’s complaints. “Boys can wear the same thing to every old occasion and call it even. I’ve got to have dresses for class, dresses for church, an evening dress for dances, shoes for gym, shoes for an evening out, hats to match, gloves, a sweater, a spring coat, a winter coat -”

It was a long list, and getting longer, and Dick had to know when he was beat. “All right, all right!” Annie allowed herself a smile. It didn’t help that it felt like the hottest afternoon of the year and here they were moving an entire room by hand up two flights of stairs. Why couldn’t have someone scheduled freshman move-in day on a weekend when it was seventy five and sunny? 

It also didn’t help that one helper had already made himself comfortable - and decidedly _un-_ helpful - in the room’s single chair. “He’s a philistine, Annie, you can’t take him anywhere. I had to make sure I brought white _ and _ black tie to school with me or there would have been hell to pay and I’d have been drummed out of the dinner club.”

Dick also knew when he was getting ganged up on. “Well, we didn’t all go to  _ Yale _ , Lewis.” But Lewis only grinned and exchanged a knowledgeable glance with Annie, the two of them knowing that they’d won.

He was still unsure about bringing Lewis on this...expedition. But Annie needed moving in, his mother was really not in any state to be going up and down this many stairs and with his father gone, the responsibility fell to him to make sure that all the bits and boxes she needed for school made their way up to her room.

He hadn't really thought that talking about it every night at the kitchen table with Lewis constituted an invitation to come with and help.

They were in a...tenuous place, where Dick's family was concerned. He didn't quite have a word for what Lewis was to him - at least, not a word he thought his mother would understand. "Dick's friend" was how Edith Winters introduced him in conversation, but that was the same way she introduced Kitty and Harry, and Lewis was...a deal more than that, to him.

It didn't seem to bother Lewis, or if it did, he made no mention of it - "Tell them I was free for the weekend," He said, breezily, when Dick expressed some trepidation about what they'd tell his mother. "People get friends to come over all the time for weekend projects - help them paint and build pergolas. It's like that."

When he put it like that, it didn't quite sound like it would work - but Mrs. Winters seemed happy that Dick and Annie wouldn't be alone, and placed Lewis in charge of the lunch she'd packed for them. 

Lunch had long since been eaten - ham and cheese on white bread, with apples and three glass-bottled Cokes tucked into the SkotchKooler, the most American of picnics. That had been an hour and about fifteen flights of stairs ago, and Dick could feel himself getting hungry again. (He hadn't had the heart to tell his mother that wars, and college move-in days, are not fought on single-sandwich white bread lunches.)

"How are we doing, by the way?" Lewis asked, listening to Dick's stomach give a very unsportsmanlike rumble.

"I think that was the last of it," Annie was pleased to report. 

“Excellent! I am calling a flag on the play. Game is postponed, pending the involvement of a snack. Who wants an ice cream? " He grinned at Dick, knowing full well he'd never met a version of the dessert he wouldn't happily consume.  _ It's your weakness, _ he'd observed one night, watching Dick like a cat in cream over a bowl of the really good, hand-churned stuff from the stand in town, and Dick had never felt more seen in his life. He had been trying to be more circumspect about his eating after that. “I saw a little place in town,” Lewis continued. “I think we can walk. My treat.”

They settled the room a little, making sure nothing would fall over and the lights were off and the windows closed and she had her keys and the door had actually locked, checked that the car wouldn’t be ticketed, and began the walk into town. Campus was just beginning to buzz as the freshman moved in, and town, too, was getting busy again, filled with families and station wagons, on their way to the next big adventure that was college.

Lewis and Annie walked ahead, chattering all the way over about sororities, and pledging, and the lady professor in the history department whose book she had just finished and whom she was so excited to be taking classes from, and the proper way to decline a date. (“Tell them your brother’s in the Army.”) Perhaps it had been good to bring him - Dick was playing the responsible parent, and Lewis the older brother, intent on making sure she got up to some of the better kinds of mischief. 

The ice cream parlor was a going concern (no surprise in a college town) all gleaming ice-blue counters with mirrors and chrome, but fairly quiet for a Saturday afternoon - a few kids deep in their milkshakes at the far booth, and one lone professor, strange in his shirtsleeves, dipping into a sundae with a long spoon while he read Sartre. 

“Right,” Lew said, stepping up to the counter and making an observation of the menu board while the teenager behind the counter shuffled over with his pad. “We have traveled far and are in need of refreshment, and we would like the biggest banana split you can offer us, my good man.”

The soda jerk, who was perhaps a few years shy of being ‘a man’ and certainly not used to be addressed like an old-time barkeep, did a bit of a double take before actually internalizing the order and coming up with a response. “...We’ve got one that’s got six scoops?” he offered, obviously feeling he wasn’t paid enough to deal with oddball customers from out of town. Nixon nodded in the affirmative. “Y’all want nuts and chocolate sauce?”

“We want everything you can legally put on ice cream,” Lew responded, absolutely serious and not giving up an inch of his Lord of the Manor routine. “Nuts, whipped cream, chocolate sauce, a couple of those cherries. Heck, we’ll even take a cocktail umbrella if you’ve got one.”

“Lew.” Dick was watching Annie, trying hard not to laugh behind them, and was finding it a little hard not to laugh himself. The soda jerk’s studied noncompliance  _ was  _ pretty funny, but sometimes Lew could take it too far. Nixon only nodded, watching as the teenager brought out one of the long glass dishes, pulled down a banana from a bunch hanging at the back of the bar, and, peeling it, began dishing ice cream like he was being paid by the hour. Vanilla, chocolate, pistachio, strawberry, all in huge scoops, mounded up like a dream and then dressed with the requested toppings.

“And don’t stint on the sauce,” Lew said over the counter, still supervising. The bell on the door dinged behind them, and another crowd came in - more of the move-in weekend. The soda jerk gave him a baleful look and gave another pass with the ladle, finally fishing a few cherries out of their jar and placing them, somewhat artistically, on the peaks in the whipped cream. “Beautiful. And three spoons please - you can keep the change. ” He laid a pair of crisp dollar bills on the counter, watching the jerk’s eye bulge with delight for the fifty percent tip on a dollar sundae, and proudly took custody of the mountain of ice cream. “Annie can take those spoons and go get us some napkins.”

He carried the sundae, quivering with all the pomp of a dressed Christmas goose, over to an open booth, and set it carefully down in the middle of the table. Dick sat down across from him, waiting while Annie nipped back with a tall stack of the flimsy paper napkins from the dispenser.

“So, was he inventing the thing or what?” Lew asked, under his breath, as Annie slid into the booth with just enough time to laugh, the long handled sundae spoons clattering on the laminate. “How hard is it to put together a sundae?

“Lew!”

But he was undeterred by Dick’s censure. “If you need a job, Annie, come in here on a Saturday when the manager’s in and tell him you can sling ice cream faster than that kid.” Annie tried not to laugh too loudly and settled for hiding her smile behind her hand. “Well - here’s to you, Annie, and a successful school year,” Lewis said, raising his spoon in toast. “May it be sweet, and filled with good things and good company.”

Annie echoed back in kind, raising her spoon to his, and Dick, belatedly, picked up his own spoon and dug into the dish, coming away with more whipped cream than ice.

“To Annie.” They clicked spoons (a dangerous endeavor) and chowed down. After however many hours of stairs and boxes, it was heavenly - and, Dick had to admit, he was hungry. He was several ecstatic spoons into the sundae when he looked up and found Lewis laughing at him. 

“What is it? What’s...what?” 

“You’ve got -” Lew shook his head, still chuckling. “On your nose.” 

Dick went cross-eyed looking down, as Lew reached out with a thumb and wiped away the rather ridiculous amount of whipped cream and chocolate that had ended up on his nose. He made a show of displaying the thumb, as if he would be accused of making this up, and then, his eyes full of laughter but never leaving Dick’s, casually licked the tip of his thumb.

Dick only hoped he wasn’t blushing. 

Lew’s smile made it hard to tell, but he went back into the ice cream with a less greedy spoon all the same, mindful of their legs mixed up under the table - and his sister sitting  _ right there,  _ her expression hard to read.

For a few minutes, all they did was eat in contented silence, Dick watching the scenes outside on the sidewalk in between bites. The chocolate was just all right, and the pistachio had an odd aftertaste. The stuff they had back at home was better, but on a hot day, not much else mattered except that it was cold. “Budge up, Annie, that jukebox is calling my name,” Lewis pronounced, after a few minutes of listening to the next crowd of middle schoolers jam through the front door, peppering the soda jerk with requests for dime cones and filling the room with inane chatter that might as well have been in Martian for all Dick understood of it. He burrowed into the sundae again as Lew and Annie did a little dance on the bench seat, Lewis finally sliding free to go and investigate the jukebox selections. When Dick looked up again, he found his sister was watching him.

“You know, Mom worries about you,” she said, very serious, her voice lower than it had been earlier, as if she was afraid of being overheard. “Being alone. She doesn’t talk about it when you’re there, but she worries. Hopes you’re... meeting people in New Jersey and all that.”

Dick didn’t know what to say to that. It seemed like an odd choice of conversation topics - and even odder still that she’d waited until Lewis had left to bring it up.

“I kinda wish...she’d been here today,” she went on, still being very careful with her words. “Because ...you make a good team,” she said with an abbreviated smile, taking another small, cautious bite of the ice cream. “You and Lewis.”

Dick felt seen again, ashamed, the same way he’d felt when Lew called him out that first time about the ice cream, a secret he hadn’t really known he’d been hiding. It was one thing to be a couple in New Jersey, or in the city, where you could be where people didn’t know you...but where you could be known? He wasn’t sure that he was there, yet - still learning that part of himself. And that Annie could see it - could see  _ them _ ?

“Yeah?” He didn’t know what else to say, how else to respond in a way that wouldn’t damn him.

“I  _ am _ starting college,” she offered, conciliatory. “I do know  _ some _ things.” She looked down at the tabletop, trying to find more words. “My friend Jenny has a brother. He, um, he doesn’t come home for Christmas now and her dad took all the pictures down and she doesn’t talk about him, like he’s…. dead or something, and I...I don’t want us to be like that, Dick, not ever. No matter what. ” She looked up again, and he knew, in that moment and the clench around his heart, that this was as hard for her to say as it was for him - that while he was keeping silent because he was afraid of losing her, she was also, in tandem, speaking up because she was afraid of losing him. “I want you to move me into college again next year,” she said, with emphasis. “And Lewis.”

_ Move me into college. _ The only way she could say this thing for which she had no words. _ Don’t go where I can’t find you. Don’t feel like you have to run away from me. Don’t let us take down the pictures. You’re my brother and I love you. _

He was so caught up in this conversation with Annie he didn’t realize there was music playing now, something pop-y and whimsical he couldn’t name. “Gosh, someone let all the air out of your balloon?” Lewis was back. “Why all the long faces, was I gone too long?”

“I was just saying we’re going to make this an annual tradition,” Annie said quickly, covering for Dick, her smile back up and bright as ever. She scooted down so Lew could take her seat and they could finish off the rest of the ice cream, puddling around the banana. “Sundaes on moving day.”

If Lew noticed the change, he didn’t say anything. “I like the way you think, Annie Winters. You’re on. We’ll see you in May to move you out. Get straight As and I’ll even get you your own sundae so you don’t have to share with Greedy-Guts over there.”

“Gee, thanks,” Annie said sarcastically.

They finished their ice cream and took the long way back through campus to digest a little, Annie pointing out the science building, and the library, and the cafeteria, the sports fields and the office where she paid her tuition. They stopped at the car to see if they’d really gotten everything, fishing through the backseat for a poster that had rolled under the seat and an extra pair of shoes that had fallen out of a box. 

Returning to the lobby of her building, Dick realized with a pang that this was it - they’d be driving home soon, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to leave just yet. There were so many things he felt like he needed to say, advice to offer or wisdom to impart, but it was fluttering around his brain like so many butterflies, impossible to catch.

In the end, it was Lewis who broke the impasse. “Right,” he said, pulling out one of the now-familiar Nixon Nitration Works business cards out of his wallet and liberating a pen from the room’s other desk. “Number on the front is the office, number on the back is home. If you need money for pizza, call him-” he jerked a thumb in Dick’s direction, “and if you need money for beer, or for bail, call _me_.” Ignoring Dick’s protests, he presented the card to Annie. She took it, read the additional note he’d dashed off beneath the phone number (“REALLY, ANY TIME”) and smiled gratefully, holding it as one might a prize certificate.

“Thanks, Lew.”

“Any time,” he repeated, as sincerely as he ever got, meeting her eye so she knew he was serious. “Now go give ‘em hell - and remember what I said about that job.”

She nodded, and then, just as suddenly, stepped in and gave Dick a hug - a long, hard one, the same kind he remembered when he’d gotten on that train to go down to Georgia all those years ago, the kind that asked you to come back.  _ Move me in again next year?  _ “Oh, Annie.” He rubbed her back. “It’s a date - last weekend in May.” He could feel her nodding against his shoulder, clinging, a little. “I’ll even let Lew pay for the ice cream again.”

She laughed, and broke away, the promise made, flinging open the door and bounding back into the dorm and all the adventures of the new school year. Dick suddenly felt very far away - until Lewis laid his hand on his back, rubbing his shoulder for comfort, and he felt his body constrict again, as if the hug had recoiled on him.

“She’s  _ your _ sister, Dick, she’ll be just fine,” Lew assured him. “And she knows where she can come if she’s not. More than I had at college, that’s for damn certain. She’s got her head on the right way - she knows what’s what.”

“Yeah,” Dick said with a smile, knowing Lew couldn’t have the first idea about what they’d talked about in the ice cream parlor, about the two of them being what they were, a partnership, a team that was more than a team. It comforted him, in a way, knowing that she knew, that there were some unknowns that could perhaps start to be filled in. “Expect she does.”

“Why the long face, tiger?” Lew asked. “If that doesn’t clear up, I’ll make you stop for ice cream again on the way home.”

Trust Lew and his jokes to bring him back to himself. Dick made a face as they walked back to the car. Ice cream once a day was a treat - but twice was an unheard-of extravagance. “It’s not that far, Lew, - and we’ve got some in the freezer.”

“Ah,” said Lew, grinning in his cheshire cat way as he slammed the door and leaned over the bench seat to whisper in Dick’s ear, in a voice he could feel down to his bones, “but do we have  _ whipped cream _ ?”

**Author's Note:**

> To whoever requested this - I know, you were hoping for something naughty. Please assume that happens after they get home. 
> 
> \--
> 
> I really like writing Annie Winters, in a variety of contexts. My fandom calling card is adding women back in and she fits the bill nicely - the age gap and gender difference mean that she gets to get away with a lot of things where her older brother is concerned, and in every universe, she's an instigator who just wants nice things for Dick. She's old enough when he leaves to remember who he was before the war, and old enough when he gets back to appreciate that something has changed. Moving into college is really liminal space - your dorm isn't really home yet and home is somewhere far away, which makes move-in weekend the perfect place for Annie to tell her brother that however he's changed, he's still her brother, and she still loves him.


End file.
